Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

A POPULAR OUTLINE

VI. DIVISION OF THE WORLD AMONG THE GREAT POWERS

In his book, on “the territorial development of the European
colonies”,
A. Supan, [1]
the geographer, gives the following
brief summary of this development at the end of the nineteenth
century:

PERCENTAGE OF TERRITORY
BELONGING TO THE EUROPEANCOLONIAL POWERS(Including
the United States)

1876

1900

Increase or decrease

Africa..........

10.8

90.4

+79.6

Polynesia....

56.8

98.9

+42.1

Asia............

51.5

56.6

+5.1

Australia.....

100.0

100.0

—

America......

27.5

27.2

-0.3

“The characteristic feature of this period,” he concludes, “is,
therefore, the division of Africa and Polynesia.” As there are
no unoccupied territories—that is, territories that do
not belong to any state in Asia and America, it is necessary to
amplify Supan’s conclusion and say that the characteristic
feature of the period under review is the final partitioning of
the globe—final, not in the sense that repartition
is impossible; on the contrary, repartitions are possible
and inevitable—but in the sense that the colonial policy
of the capitalist countries has completed the seizure
of the unoccupied territories on our planet. For the first time
the world is completely divided up, so that in the future
only redivision is possible, i.e., territories can only
pass from one “owner” to another, instead of passing as
ownerless territory to an owner

Hence, we are living in a peculiar epoch of world colonial
policy, which is most closely connected with the “latest stage
in the development of capitalism”, with finance capital. For
this reason, it is essential first of all to deal in greater
detail with the facts, in order to ascertain as exactly as
possible what distinguishes this epoch from those preceding it,
and what the present situation is. In the first place, two
questions of fact arise here: is an intensification of colonial
policy, a sharpening of the struggle for colonies, observed
precisely in the epoch of finance capital? And how, in this
respect, is the world divided at the present time?

The American writer, Morris, in his book on the history of
colonisation, [2]
made an attempt to sum up the data
on the colonial possessions of Great Britain, France and Germany
during different periods of the nineteenth century. The
following is a brief summary of the results he has obtained:

COLONIAL POSSESSIONS

Year

Great Britain

France

Germany

Area(000,000sq. m.)

Pop. (000,000)

Area(000,000sq. m.)

Pop. (000,000)

Area(000,000sq. m.)

Pop. (000,000)

1815-30

?

126.4

0.02

0.5

—

—

1860

2.5

145.1

0.2

3.4

—

—

1880

7.7

267.9

0.7

7.5

—

—

1899

9.3

309.0

3.7

56.4

1.0

14.7

For Great Britain, the period of the enormous expansion of
colonial conquests was that between 1860 and 1880, and it was
also very considerable in the last twenty years of the
nineteenth century. For France and Germany this period falls
precisely in these twenty years. We saw above that the
development of premonopoly capitalism, of capitalism in which
free competition was predominant, reached its limit in the 1860s
and 1870s. We now see that it is precisely after that
period that the tremendous “boom” in colonial conquests
begins, and that the struggle for the territorial division of
the world becomes extraordinarily sharp. It is beyond doubt,
therefore, that capitalism’s transition to the stage of monopoly
capitalism, to finance capital, is connected with the
intensification of the struggle for the partitioning of the
world.

Hobson, in his work on imperialism, marks the years 1884-1900 as
the epoch of intensified “expansion” of the chief European
states. According to his estimate, Great Britain during these
years acquired 3,700,000 square miles of territory with
57,000,000 inhabitants; France, 3,600,000 square miles with
36,500,000; Germany, 1,000,000 square miles with 14,700,000;
Belgium, 900,000 square miles with 30,000,000; Portugal, 800,000
square miles with 9,000,000 inhabitants. The scramble for
colonies by all the capitalist states at the end of the
nineteenth century and particularly since the 1880s is a
commonly known fact in the history of diplomacy and of foreign
policy.

In the most flourishing period of free competition in Great
Britain, i.e., between 1840 and 1860, the leading British
bourgeois politicians were opposed to colonial policy
and were of the opinion that the liberation of the colonies,
their complete separation from Britain, was inevitable and
desirable. M. Beer, in an article, “Modern British
Imperialism”, [3]
published in 1898, shows that in
1852, Disraeli, a statesman who was generally inclined towards
imperialism, declared: “The colonies are millstones round our
necks.” But at the end of the nineteenth century the British
heroes of the hour were Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain, who
openly advocated imperialism and applied the imperialist policy
in the most cynical manner!

It is not without interest to observe that even then these
leading British bourgeois politicians saw the connection between
what might be called the purely economic and the socio-political
roots of modern imperialism. Chamberlain advocated imperialism
as a “true, wise and economical policy”, and pointed
particularly to the German, American and Belgian competition
which Great Britain was encountering in the world
market. Salvation lies in monopoly, said the capitalists as
they formed cartels, syndicates and trusts. Salvation lies in
monopoly, echoed the political leaders of the bourgeoisie,
hastening to appropriate the parts of the world not yet shared
out. And Cecil Rhodes, we are informed by his intimate friend,
the journalist Stead, expressed his imperialist views to him in
1895 in the following terms: “I was in the East End of London (a
working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the
unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a
cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the
scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of
imperialism.... My cherished idea is a solution for the social
problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of
the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial
statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus
population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the
factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a
bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you
must become
imperialists. [4]

That was said in 1895 by Cecil Rhodes, millionaire, a king of
finance, the man who was mainly responsible for the Anglo-Boer
War. True, his defence of imperialism is crude and cynical, but
in substance it does not differ from the “theory” advocated by
Messrs. Maslov, Südekum, Potresov, David, the founder of
Russian Marxism and others. Cecil Rhodes was a somewhat more
honest social-chauvinist....

To present as precise a picture as possible of the territorial
division of the world and of the changes which have occurred
during the last decades in this respect, I shall utilise the
data furnished by Supan in the work already quoted on the
colonial possessions of all the powers of the world. Supan takes
the years 1876 and 1900; I shall take the year 1876—a
year very aptly selected, for it is precisely by that time that
the pre-monopolist stage of development of West-European
capitalism can be said to have been, in the main, completed—and the year 1914, and instead of Supan’s figures I shall
quote the more recent statistics of Hübner’s
Geographical and Statistical Tables. Supan gives
figures only for colonies; I think it useful, in order to
present a complete picture of the division of the world, to add
brief data on non-colonial and semi-colonial countries, in which
category I place Persia, China and Turkey: the first of these
countries is already almost completely a colony, the second and
third are becoming such.

We thus get the following result:

COLONIAL POSSESSIONS OF THE
GREAT POWERS(000,000 square kilometers and 000,000
inhabitants)

Colonies

Metropolitancountries

Total

1876

1914

1914

1914

Area

Pop.

Area

Pop.

Area

Pop.

Area

Pop.

Great Britain

22.5

251.9

33.5

393.5

0.3

46.5

33.8

444.0

Russia

17.0

15.9

17.4

33.2

5.4

136.2

22.8

169.4

France

0.9

6.0

10.6

55.5

0.5

39.6

11.1

95.1

Germany

—

—

2.9

12.3

0.5

64.9

3.4

77.2

United States

—

—

0.3

9.7

9.4

97.0

9.7

106.7

Japan

—

—

0.3

19.2

0.4

53.0

0.7

72.2

Total for 6 GreatPowers

40.4

273.8

65.0

523.4

16.5

437.2

81.5

960.6

Colonies of other powers (Belgium,
Holland, etc.)

9.9

45.3

Semi-colonial countries (Persia, China, Turkey)

14.5

361.2

Other countries

28.0

289.9

Total for the world

133.9

1,657.0

We clearly see from these figures how “complete” was the
partition of the world at the turn of the twentieth
century. After 1876 colonial possessions increased to enormous
dimensions, by more than fifty per cent, from 40,000,000 to
65,000,000 square kilometres for the six biggest powers; the
increase amounts to 25,000,000 square kilometres, fifty per cent
more than the area of the metropolitan countries (16,500,000
square kilometres). In 1876 three powers had no colonies, and a
fourth, France, had scarcely any. By 1914 these four powers had
acquired colonies with an area of 14,100,000 square kilometres,
i.e., about half as much again as the area of Europe, with a
population of nearly 100,000,000. The unevenness in the rate of
expansion of colonial possessions is very great. If, for
instance, we compare France, Germany and Japan, which do not
differ very much in area and population, we see that the first
has acquired almost three times as much colonial territory as
the other two combined. In regard to finance capital, France, at
the beginning of the period we are considering, was also,
perhaps, several times richer than Germany and Japan put
together. In addition to, and on the basis of, purely economic
conditions, geographical and other conditions also affect the
dimensions of
colonial possessions. However strong the process of levelling
the world, of levelling the economic and living conditions in
different countries, may have been in the past decades as a
result of the pressure of large-scale industry, exchange and
finance capital, considerable differences still remain; and
among the six countries mentioned we see, firstly, young
capitalist countries (America, Germany, Japan) whose progress
has been extraordinarily rapid; secondly, countries with an old
capitalist development (France and Great Britain), whose
progress lately has been much slower than that of the previously
mentioned countries, and thirdly, a country most backward
economically (Russia), where modern capitalist imperialism is
enmeshed, so to speak, in a particularly close network of
pre-capitalist relations.

Alongside the colonial possessions of the Great Powers, we have
placed the small colonies of the small states, which are, so to
speak, the next objects of a possible and probable “redivision”
of colonies. These small states mostly retain their colonies
only because the big powers are torn by conflicting interests,
friction, etc., which prevent them from coming to an agreement
on the division of the spoils. As to the “semi-colonial” states,
they provide an example of the transitional forms which are to
be found in all spheres of nature and society. Finance capital
is such a great, such a decisive, you might say, force in all
economic and in all international relations, that it is capable
of subjecting, and actually does subject, to itself even states
enjoying the fullest political independence; we shall shortly
see examples of this. Of course, finance capital finds most
“convenient”, and derives the greatest profit from, a form
of subjection which involves the loss of the political
independence of the subjected countries and peoples. In this
respect, the semi-colonial countries provide a typical example
of the “middle stage”. It is natural that the struggle for these
semidependent countries should have become particularly bitter
in the epoch of finance capital, when the rest of the world has
already been divided up.

Colonial policy and imperialism existed before the latest stage
of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on
slavery, pursued a colonial policy and practised
imperialism. But “general” disquisitions on imperialism, which
ignore, or put into the background, the fundamental difference
between socio-economic formations, inevitably turn into the most
vapid banality or bragging, like the comparison: “Greater Rome
and Greater
Britain.” [5]
Even the capitalist colonial policy
of previous stages of
capitalism is essentially different from the colonial policy of
finance capital.

The principal feature of the latest stage of capitalism is the
domination of monopolist associations of big employers. These
monopolies are most firmly established when all the
sources of raw materials are captured by one group, and we have
seen with what zeal the international capitalist associations
exert every effort to deprive their rivals of all opportunity of
competing, to buy up, for example, ironfields, oilfields,
etc. Colonial possession alone gives the monopolies complete
guarantee against all contingencies in the struggle against
competitors, including the case of the adversary wanting to be
protected by a law establishing a state monopoly. The more
capitalism is developed, the more strongly the shortage of raw
materials is felt, the more intense the competition and the hunt
for sources of raw materials throughout the whole world, the
more desperate the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.

“It may be asserted,” writes Schilder, “although it may sound
paradoxical to some, that in the more or less foreseeable future
the growth of the urban and industrial population is more likely
to be hindered by a shortage of raw materials for industry than
by a shortage of food.” For example, there is a growing shortage
of timber—the price of which is steadily rising—of
leather, and of raw materials for the textile
industry. “Associations of manufacturers are making efforts to
create an equilibrium between agriculture and industry in the
whole of world economy; as an example of this we might mention
the International Federation of Cotton Spinners’ Associations in
several of the most important industrial countries, founded in
1904, and the European Federation of Flax Spinners’
Associations, founded on the same model in
1910.” [6]

Of course, the bourgeois reformists, and among them particularly
the present-day adherents of Kautsky, try to belittle the
importance of facts of this kind by arguing that raw materials
“could be” obtained in the open market without a “costly and
dangerous” colonial policy; and that the supply of raw materials
“could be” increased enormously by “simply” improving conditions
in agriculture in general. But such arguments become an apology
for imperialism, an attempt to paint it in bright colours,
because they ignore the principal feature of the latest stage of
capitalism: monopolies. The free market is becoming more and
more a thing of the past; monopolist syndicates and trusts are
restricting it with every passing day, and “simply” improving
conditions in agriculture means improving the conditions of the
masses, raising wages and reducing profits. Where, except in the
imagination of sentimental reformists, are there any trusts
capable of concerning themselves with the condition of the
masses instead of the conquest of colonies?

Finance capital is interested not only in the already discovered
sources of raw materials but also in potential sources, because
present-day technical development is extremely rapid, and land
which is useless today may be improved tomorrow if new methods
are devised (to this end a big bank can equip a special
expedition of engineers, agricultural experts, etc.), and if
large amounts of capital are invested. This also applies to
prospecting for minerals, to new methods of processing up and
utilising raw materials, etc., etc. Hence, the inevitable
striving of finance capital to enlarge its spheres of influence
and even its actual territory. In the same way that the trusts
capitalise their property at two or three times its value,
taking into account its “potential” (and not actual) profits and
the further results of monopoly, so finance capital in general
strives to seize the largest possible amount of land of all
kinds in all places, and by every means, taking into account
potential sources of raw materials and fearing to be left behind
in the fierce struggle for the last remnants of independent
territory, or for the repartition of those territories that have
been already divided.

The British capitalists are exerting every effort to develop
cotton growing in their colony, Egypt (in 1904, out of
2,300,000 hectares of land under cultivation, 600,000, or more
than one-fourth, were under cotton); the Russians are doing the
same in their colony, Turkestan, because in this way
they will be in a better position to defeat their foreign
competitors, to monopolise the sources of raw materials and form
a more economical and profitable textile trust in which all
the processes of cotton production and manufacturing will
be “combined” and concentrated in the hands of one set of
owners.

The interests pursued in exporting capital also give an impetus
to the conquest of colonies, for in the colonial market it is
easier to employ monopoly methods (and sometimes they are the
only methods that can be employed) to eliminate competition, to
ensure supplies, to secure the necessary “connections”, etc.

The non-economic superstructure which grows up on the basis of
finance capital, its politics and its ideology, stimulates the
striving for colonial conquest. “Finance capital does not want
liberty, it wants domination,” as Hilferding very truly
says. And a French bourgeois writer, developing and
supplementing, as it were, the ideas of Cecil Rhodes quoted
above,[7]
writes that social causes should be added to the
economic causes of modern colonial policy: “Owing to the growing
complexities of life and the difficulties which weigh not only
on the masses of the workers, but also on the middle classes,
‘impatience, irritation and hatred are accumulating in all the
countries of the old civilisation and are becoming a menace to
public order; the energy which is being hurled out of the
definite class channel must be given employment abroad in order
to avert an explosion at
home’.” [8]

Since we are speaking of colonial policy in the epoch of
capitalist imperialism, it must be observed that finance capital
and its foreign policy, which is the struggle of the great
powers for the economic and political division of the world,
give rise to a number of transitional forms of state
dependence. Not only are the two main groups of countries, those
owning colonies, and the colonies themselves, but also the
diverse forms of dependent countries which, politically, are
formally independent, but in fact, are enmeshed in the net of
financial and diplomatic dependence, typical of this epoch. We
have already referred to one form of dependence—the
semi-colony. An example of another is provided by Argentina.

“South America, and especially Argentina,” writes
Schulze-Gaevernitz in his work on British imperialism, “is so
dependent financially on London that it ought to be described as
almost a British commercial
colony.” [9]
Basing himself on
the reports of the Austro-Hungarian Consul at Buenos Aires for
1909, Schilder estimated the amount of British capital invested
in Argentina at 8,750 million francs. It is not difficult to
imagine what strong connections British finance capital (and its
faithful “friend”, diplomacy) thereby acquires with the
Argentine bourgeoisie, with the circles that control the whole
of that country’s economic and political life.

A somewhat different form of financial and diplomatic
dependence, accompanied by political independence, is presented
by Portugal. Portugal is an independent sovereign state, but
actually, for more than two hundred years, since the war of the
Spanish Succession (1701-14), it has been a British
protectorate. Great Britain has protected Portugal and her
colonies in order to fortify her own positions in the fight
against her rivals, Spain and France. In return Great Britain
has received commercial privileges, preferential conditions for
importing goods and especially capital into Portugal and the
Portuguese colonies, the right to use the ports and islands of
Portugal, her telegraph cables, etc.,
etc. [10]
Relations of this
kind have always existed between big and little states, but in
the epoch of capitalist imperialism they become a general
system, they form part of the sum total of “divide the world”
relations and become links in the chain of operations of world
finance capital.

In order to finish with the question of the division of the
world, I must make the following additional observation. This
question was raised quite openly and definitely not only in
American literature after the Spanish-American War, and in
English literature after the Anglo-Boer War, at the very end of
the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth; not
only has German literature, which has “most jealously” watched
“British imperialism”, systematically given its appraisal of
this fact. This question has also been raised in French
bourgeois literature as definitely and broadly as is thinkable
from the bourgeois point of view. Let me quote Driault, the
historian, who, in his book, Political and Social Problems
at the End of the Nineteenth Century, in the chapter “The
Great Powers and the Division of the World”, wrote the
following: “During the past few years, all the free territory of
the globe, with the exception of China, has been occupied by the
powers of Europe and North America. This has already brought
about several conflicts and shifts of spheres of influence, and
these foreshadow more terrible upheavals in the near future. For
it is necessary to make haste. The nations which have not yet
made provision for themselves run the risk of never receiving
their share and never participating in the tremendous
exploitation of the globe which will be one of the most
essential features of the next century (i.e., the
twentieth). That is why all Europe and America have lately been
afflicted with the fever of colonial expansion, of
‘imperialism’, that most noteworthy feature of the end of the
nineteenth century.” And the author added: “In this partition
of the world, in this furious hunt for the treasures and the big
markets of the globe, the relative strength of the empires
founded in this nineteenth century is totally out of proportion
to the place occupied in Europe by the nations which founded
them. The dominant powers in Europe, the arbiters of her
destiny, are not equally preponderant in the whole
world. And, as colonial might, the hope of controlling as yet
unassessed wealth, will evidently react upon the relative
strength of the European powers, the colonial question—“imperialism”,
if you will—which has already modified the
political conditions of Europe itself, will modify them more and
more.” [11]